The boldness of the policy is the product of assumptions so ingrained the zealots see no need to explain them. Fixated by their own mechanistic ideology, they blandly expect voters to understand intuitively — or religiously, as they seem to do — that destroying jobs will create jobs and that cutting taxes will increase revenue. It’s all so clear to them. Don’t you see, Ontario?

This stuff is not intuitive. It sounds like guaranteed pain for nebulous gain. If you really have it in for public-sector workers — and plenty of people do, with their union protection, comfy pensions, job security and frequently left-wing views — cutting their numbers can be an attractive thing in itself. As means to an end, although there’s a definite logic behind it, it’s harder to explain.

Indeed, Barber sort of misses it in a couple of ways.

First of all, the PCs don’t argue that cutting taxes will increase revenue. That’s an old conservative idea, associated with Ronald Reagan but older than his presidency. Read up on the Laffer Curve if you need to. It’s not relevant here because the Tories aren’t arguing it. They aren’t saying the provincial government will end up with more money if they cut taxes. The documents they’ve used to support their economic policies say the opposite — that cutting taxes will cut government revenues, but there’ll be a small offsetting effect from juicing the economy by leaving people more money to spend. It doesn’t make up for the revenues lost in the tax cuts. Not even close.

What they are saying is that some of their cuts will free up money for more important things. I don’t know if we really believe that a Hudak government would start covering all kinds of orphan drugs and provide the best classroom help in the Western world for kids with special-needs (that’s certainly not what happened under the last Tory government we elected), but that’s what he promises.

This misreading of Hudak’s argument about spending cuts is closely related to the second error Barber (among plenty of other people) makes. He writes that Hudak’s 100,000-cuts plan is for “the sole purpose of achieving a magic zero in the public accounts a year or two before the other parties.”

It isn’t. It has that effect, and you could be forgiven for thinking that was the point because Hudak spends a lot of time talking about the evils of running a deficit. But the point is to make the Ontario government smaller permanently. By 2016-2017, the farthest out both the Liberals and the Tories project their respective plans, the PCs expect to spend $112.8 billion on programs while the Liberals expect to spend $120.2 billion.

It’s not the deficit that’s the point, or how soon we stop running one, as far as the Conservatives are concerned. They argue Ontario would be better off with a government that spends less because it does less, and therefore leaves more money in taxpayers’ hands to do with as we wish.

There’s also an obvious economic logic to this. You can’t build an economy on public services. Teachers, nurses and social workers all do necessary and important work but they aren’t in themselves economic generators. There’s a legitimate concern about the economic shock resulting from throwing 100,000 of them out of work, but if we could just hire everyone to be a public servant and run our economy that way, we’d never have an unemployment problem again. But we can’t and we don’t.

Hudak does himself no favours in his constant “town halls” that are populated completely by loyal supporters. (See below for an update.) If you’re skeptical of Hudak’s plans, you can’t watch one of these events and get your question addressed. Hudak himself constantly skips steps in his economic analysis, hammering away at the deficit, the deficit, the deficit, the deficit rather than explaining what his broader economic philosophy is. Possibly because a deficit is pretty much universally acknowledged as an undesirable thing, whereas a smaller government as an end in itself is not.

By skipping steps, though, he makes it harder than it needs to be to understand his smaller-government pitch.

Update: The PCs email to say that their town halls are open to anyone, and Hudak was heckled Monday at an appearance in Peterborough that a number of anti-Hudak types crashed.

Having been to one in Ottawa and watched several others remotely, that’s the exception, but in fairness, if people want to go and raise their own objections, apparently they can.

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